Real Estate, Housing & Infrastructure
A cat has caused a major fire at a power plant in southern Iran, according to media reports. According to the report, the animal had entered the power plant on Charg Island on Saturday night and then continued to the area of the safety box. For reasons unknown so far, this led to a short circuit, a cable fire and ultimately to the major fire, it said.
Fire department emergency personnel were able to extinguish the fire, but the power plant had to be shut down for several hours. Accordingly, the more than 10,000 inhabitants of the island had no electricity on Saturday.
The Norwegian billionaire and adventurer Ivar Tollefsen enters the Berlin market for residential real estate through the Swedish housing group Heimstaden Bostad, which he controls. For approximately €830 million he will buy 3902 apartments in central situations of Berlin, according to Heimastaden Bostad.
According to the company, the rental space totals 282,000 square meters. This means that these are smaller apartments and stores with an average floor area of just under 67 square meters.
Protest against the project has already been organized in some apartment buildings. The Berlin district Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg has stated that they are examining the possiblity of a exercising a pre-emptive right of purchase.
Google has announced that it'll build a new subsea internet cable to connect the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. The so-called "Grace Hopper" cable will be used to "better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products" according to the press announcement.
The new cable connection will be the first private one for Google between the United States and the United Kingdom as well as Google's first one to Spain. The latter one will be connected to the planned "Google Cloud region in Madrid" and used to integrate it into the global infrastructure. Google has signed the contract with the subsea cable provider SubCom and expects the project to be completed in 2022.
The furniture retailer and producer from Sweden has announced that in their pursuit of using 100% materials that are renewable or recycled by 2030, they have reached the milestone of 70% in 2018.
The orthopaedic surgeon, Joseph Alsousou, was forced to leave his apartment after the landlady cancelled the contract in fear of getting the coronavirus. In order to help other NHS workers facing the same problem, he set up a website to match them with citizens or companies that are willing to provide accommodation for NHS workers for free or at drastically reduced rates. The website is